The book's author, John Barth, later called it"the first American postmodern novel." Othershave read it as allegory or science fiction ormagical realism or Cold War satire. Lifemagazine, labelled Giles Goat-Boy "a blackcomedy to offend everyone." On the otherhand, a tech savvy reader of the present day,noting the prominent role computers play inits plot, might laud it as the first novel ofthe digital era or even a Univac-era prototypefor cyberpunk.

I'm not surprised that critics came to logger-heads over the merits of this book. EliotFremont-Smith, writing in the New York Times,suggested that Barth had delivered an elaborate"shaggy-goat story,” but also wondered whetherit might not be “the great American novel, comeat last into being.” On the other extreme, Gore Vidalattacked it as a “very bad prose work,” and Berkeley prof RobertAlter dismissed Barth’s novel as a “failed experiment.”

Me? If forced to come up with a tweet-sized summary, I'd describeGiles Goat-Boy as a cross between Tarzan of the Apes and theHoly Bible. Barth’s novel is almost as long as the King JamesVersion, and follows roughly the same plot line. Clocking it at 710pages of tiny font print, plus another 33 pages of postmoderntext-before-the-text, Barth's book is sufficiently longwinded forGideon's Goat-Boy status at the deconstructionists' Days Inn. And few novels have incorporated more theology (or perhapsparodies of theology) into a prophetic narrative. This is as closeto scriptural resonance as meta-fiction gets...but with a heavysprinkling of Burroughs (both Edgar Rice and the Unysis predecessorcorporation).

Yet Barth impart a peculiar twist to his evangelical tract (which carriesthe daunting but suitably rapturous subtitle: The Revised New Syllabusof George Giles our Grand Tutor). All the theology—and everythingelse in this novel—gets turned into campus politics. The universe, inGiles Goat-Boy, is a university, and the different regimes arecompeting colleges, with a a Cold War (or 'quiet riot') persistingbetween West Campus and East Campus. God is the college'Founder' and all students aspire to pass on Judgment Day, or as itis known in these pages, ‘Final Commencement’. Failure is equivalentto eternal damnation.

Here’s a taste of Barth’s reduction of religion to a college honor code:

Our Founder, Who art omniscient,Commencéd be thy name;Thy college come; Thy assignments doneOn campus as beyond the gate.Give us this term Thy termly word.And excuse our cribbing.As we excuse classmates who crib from us…..

And here is a blues lyric, as conceived by Barth forhis world-as-university:

I had a C, but now my grade’s gone down;I hate to see the av’rage grade go down.Gonna flunk, baby; never wear no cap and gown.

A university of this sort needs a prophet and savior(or 'Grand Tutor' in the parlance of the book), andBarth gives us a protagonist who aims to fill preciselythat exalted role. He goes by many names: BillyBockfuss or George or 'The GILES' or the Goat-Boy, or simply 'TheGoat'. Our hero, like Romulus and Remus and tree-swinging ape-men,was raised among the animals. In George’s case, he grew up with aherd of goats, and only realizes at the brink of adulthood that he isactually a human.

George decides that he is the Grand Tutor the university has longbeen awaiting, and tackles a serious of challenges and tasks inhopes of proving his credentials. In particular, he needs to fulfillthe assignments given him by WESCAC, the all-powerful computerrunning the West Campus and managing the deadly defensetechnology that deters its East Campus rival (EASCAC) but alsothreatens to end all studentdom as we know it. Adding to the plot'scomplexity and general weirdness, the computer may be George'sprogenitor, and the young goatboy the abandoned result ofWESCAC’s ambitious eugenics program.

Barth works hard to sustain these farcical concepts for more than 700pages, and his sheer inventiveness and risk-taking in the pursuit ofthe absurd is breathtaking. I especially admire his ability to extractsatirical commentaries on a wide range of subjects—political,philosophical and sociological—from his cardboard charactersand corny plotlines. Every turn in the plot can be interpreted in multipleways, and I lost count of the number of myths and venerated literaryworks echoed in these pages. You could read this novel as a kind of New Testament, as I suggested above, or as a modernized Book of Job or postmodernized Don Quixote, or a reworking of the Hercules myth orthe Odyssey. (Take note, for example, of the number of times the storyof Ulysses and Cyclops is echoed in these pages.)

Despite the author’s unflagging creative (and polemical) zeal, manyreaders will bail out before the final "Footnote to the Postscript tothe Posttape," exasperated by the long-winded narrative and therepetitions in the plotline. I realize that a retelling of the Gospelrequires a quasi-crucifixion and for our Goat-Boy to confrontWESCAC who, like Darth Vader, may be the hero’s unlikelychrome-and-plastic daddy. But after Barth achieves these ends,and brilliantly in my opinion, a little after 500 pages into the book,he repeats the formula two more times—again a comparison withStar Wars comes to mind—with return encounters with WESCACand the resulting turmoil. The final 200 pages of the novel dragalong with little momentum, a joke that was never quite funny nowturning sour.

Is unrelenting cleverness sufficient to make a novel into a masterpiece?If so, Giles Goat-Boy is a classic. Even if some of the interludes dolittle or nothing to move ahead the story—for example, a long parodyof a Greek tragedy presented in full over the course of fifty pages—theyare so smartly conceived that they could stand on their own as setpieces. Another example: Barth offers his campus equivalent ofDante's Inferno, describing the different levels of the college 'maindetention' where university offenders receive appropriate punishmentsfor their crimes. Among the damned we encounter "students whorefused to choose a major," "those who abused their dining-hallprivileges," "professors who turned their sabbatical leaves intohoneymoons or participated in faculty wife-swapping parties,""textbook writers who published revised editions to undercut theused-book market," "proliferators of unnecessary footnotes," and"teachers employed in the same departments from which they holddegrees," among other miscreants. Yes, Barth has them on his list,and they'll none of them be missed. In such sardonic passages welearn that our author not only knows how to use university life to satirizethe real world, but also can rely on the real world to satirize universitylife.

And I enjoyed a few of the minor characters, even if they are hardlymore plausible than comic book villains and get endlessly manipulatedas stand-ins for concepts. Harold Bray, a competing prophet whopossesses a chameleon-like ability to change his appearance andabilities, is the most fascinating of the bunch, and the one leasteasy to interpret. (I'm not surprised that Barth brought him back ina later book.) But I also took some delight in the devilish Stoker, whoruns the campus powerhouse and main detention when he isn'tcruising with his motorcycle gang, and Lady Creamhair, theGoat-Boy's mother, who becomes less coherent but more amusingas the story unfolds.

Let me call it straight. If you are seeking sheer, unadulteratedweirdness, you won't find a stronger candidate from that long,strange trip of the 1960s. By comparison, Pynchon's Gravity'sRainbow is a realistic war novel and Ken Kesey a candidate todrive the local elementary school bus. So let's give two cheers—maybe even one cheer more—for the Goat-Boy's esprit de corps.He's a true postmodern hero with all the equivocal associationsimplied by that label. Yes, this could have been a better novel if itweren't quite so bloated. Then again, if John Barth were the kindof author to show restraint, he probably wouldn't have pursuedsuch a crazy and extravagant project in the first place.

Ted Gioia writes on books, music and popular culture. His next book,Love Songs: The Hidden History, will be published by Oxford University Press.